assemblages & affinities: reimagining interdisciplinarity a symposium

23 SEPTEMBER 2013ASIAN AMERICAN CULTURAL CENTER1210 W. NEVADA ST.URBANA9-4:30 PM FREE & OPEN TO PUBLICRECEPTION TO FOLLOWBuilding on recent collaborative, international conversations about the conditions and possibilities for interdisciplinarity under current and emerging structures and strategies of the public university, this symposium hopes to contribute to this critical discussion by identifying and crafting new questions for reimagining (and reclaiming, if necessary) interdisciplinarity. The keynote speakers will take up the question of interdisciplinarity as an intellectual quandary and a structural dilemma. Through such concepts as assemblage and affinity, we invite critique of the certainties required for simple comparison --discreteness, distinctiveness, discontinuity – as well as new approaches for productive inquiry. And, under the intertwined contexts of disciplines under crisis, what appears to be a re-disciplinization (as the conveners of The University Beyond Crisis at CUNY have identified), and a neoliberalizing public university, we hope to illuminate pathways for articulating new arrangements in the intellectual and institutional spaces we inhabit.INVITED SPEAKERS: Ruth Nicole Brown (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), Kandice Chuh (CUNY Grad Center), Jodi Melamed (Marquette University), Wesley Crichlow (University of Ontario Institute of Technology) , Maria Josefina Saldana-Portillo (New York University), and Suzanne Oboler (CUNY Grad Center).

This symposium is generously paid for by the Student Cultural Programming Fee, the University of Illinois Research Board Diversity Funding Pilot Initiative, and the Graduate College, and co-sponsored by American Indian and Indigenous Studies, Anthropology, Asian American Cultural Center, Asian American Studies, English, Gender and Women's Studies, History, Latina/o Studies, The LGBT Resource Center, La Casa, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory.